Ptak Associates paints the big picture on Cloud Computing, Mobile, IoT, DevOps, Big Data, Cognitive Computing, and Workload Optimized Systems. Partnering with us, IT organizations understand and prioritize their needs within the context of IT trends, and technology vendors refine their strategies. We provide both with market insight, actionable recommendations, and deliverables that communicate the business values of their products and services

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Thursday, June 16, 2016

Cognitive Computing – fitting the platform to the application

By Rich Ptak

Recently, it has been popular to assert that IT
professionals and business staff need no longer concern

themselves or consider
IT infrastructure. Among other reasons, the claim is that with the growth of
Cloud computing and commoditization, infrastructure no longer matters. The assertion
being that a general purpose architecture provides all the processing flexibility
and power needed to deliver a range of services.

We are convinced that this view
is short-sighted and wrong as it ignores the changing dynamics of computing as
Moore’s Law runs down, and technology evolves. It focuses on traditional
performance metrics while ignoring the realities disrupting IT, how it is
designed, implemented and realized in operations and applications.

It trivializes the difficulties
in evolving and delivering systems that are able to meet the requirements of
the high speed, data-intensive, highly scalable, adaptable workloads associated
with evolving technologies of genomics, nanotechnology, etc. It denies or
wishes to ignore the need for and interest in open, standards-based systems-oriented
infrastructure able to intelligently adapt and optimize for evolving workloads.

Identifying the Future of Infrastructure

There are enterprise and IT professionals who recognize and
understand the implications of the extraordinary demands placed on
infrastructure as a result of the combination of today’s competitive market and
evolving technologies.

With the IBM IT Infrastructure Point
of View[1] (POV) website, IBM offers these
professionals “thought leadership” opinions and insights that promote and support
the role of IT leaders in planning the use of technology to achieve
organizational success. The target audience are those who not only understand
the demand, but also seek to add to their knowledge in order to better prepare
themselves and their organizations to meet future challenges.

Today’s Digital enterprises are being challenged to meet
escalating expectations of clients and customers for extraordinary performance,
dynamic scalability, robust adaptability and rapid innovation in the delivery
of services and products. Such demands cannot be met with infrastructure and
systems compromised to provide common denominator needs. Nor, can it be met
with the ‘static’ configurations and fixed architectures of the very recent
past.

Meeting the evolving demands of
data and compute intensive digital enterprise, requires a systems
infrastructure for server and storage operations that can be intelligently
optimized. The infrastructure must be optimized to deal with emerging, evolving
styles of computing. It must be flexible enough to integrate and interact with
emerging technologies while still able to interoperate with existing operating
environments. It must also be intelligently and cognitively adaptable to meet
the emerging demands of whatever workload it takes on.

IBM’s Point of View on IT Infrastructure for Cognitive Workloads

With the explosion of Cognitive computing, its hybrid cloud
platforms, Power and z Systems, storage solutions and experience in leading
edge technologies and solutions, IBM is uniquely positioned to work with
clients to help to shape the future of their computing operations. Enterprise
IT must not only get the most from their existing infrastructure but must also
act to leverage new cognitive capabilities and take advantage of emerging technologies.

Today’s systems-oriented solutions depend upon server and
storage technologies that can be combined with software driven cognitive
abilities, such as IBM’s Watson. Cognitive computing has the potential to understand,
reason, learn and adapt to changes in their operational environment and
workloads. IBM is working with clients, customers and partners to push the
boundaries of what is possible with an IT infrastructure optimized for cognitive
workloads.

In recognition of all this, IBM is publishing a Point of
View (PoV) about IT infrastructure and cognitive workloads. It describes in
significant detail how IBM, in conjunction with its partners, will advise and
work with customers to aid them in their efforts to organize and plan in order to
gain the most advantage from their IT systems and storage infrastructure.

As would be expected, key to
this approach are the IBM solutions portfolio of z Systems, Power Systems, IBM
Storage, hybrid cloud services and software-driven cognitive computing (ala
Watson).

This strategy is built around
three principles:

Design
for Cognitive Business – to allow action at the speed of thought,

Delivery
through a Cloud Platform – to extend the value of systems and data.

IBM has multiple projects (both under-way and completed) where
cognitive computing has provided the key factor in achieving competitive
advantage, financial performance and enterprise success. The involve
enterprises and organizations in a wide variety of markets. The projects have accelerated
time to insights with infrastructure deliberately designed and architected for
unstructured data with companies in banking, oil and gas exploration, and
academia. They have sped-up development of new solutions while cutting the time-to-market.
They have provided infrastructure optimized to run specific workloads with
unique business requirements for customers ranging from government agencies to
healthcare services.

We won’t steal any more of IBM’s thunder. We
suggest that you visit the IBM IT
infrastructuresiteto
review the details. In our opinion, IBM appears to be well ahead of its
competition with its comprehensive, customer-centric view and vision. They are
also uniquely positioned to speak on this topic. They have both the cutting
edge technology and significant real-life implementation experience with
products to demonstrate their ability to deliver on their visions for the
future of cognitive computing supported by intelligent infrastructure.